As a boy, I really wanted a telescope

As a small boy, I desperately wanted a telescope. I loved looking at the stars and the moon. Light pollution meant I could only rarely make out the Milky Way—when I did, it just looked like light cloud—but I really wanted to see it in more detail. I'd also heard that stars had different colours. These weren't visible in the town I grew up in.

But telescopes were well outside my family's financial resources. I had a toy one—sold as a 'pirate telescope'—but it was totally inadequate for what I wanted to do with it.

I tried to make my own. I got hold of spectacle lenses from somewhere, but they all turned out to be concave. They made things smaller, not bigger. I looked into their history as far as I could. I only had the books of a small public library to refer to. But I contemplated grinding my own lenses from some leftover panes of glass from the greenhouse my granddad had built.

It all came to nothing in the end. It did, however, introduce me to Galileo. I learnt the story of how the telescope had widened people's horizons and allowed us to discover just how wonderful and big the Universe is. It was all very exciting. Later, when I got to secondary school, I learnt about X-ray crystallography, chromatography and spectroscopy. I saw straight away that these were equivalent to the telescope. They were new ways of looking at things, enabling us to see what had never before been seen. The elucidation of the structure of DNA was still recent enough to feel like news. I loved it.

This led me to adopt a scientific career. I wasn't particularly drawn to the academic side of things. I just wanted to know how things worked and what they were really like. I also wasn't influenced by the utility of scientific knowledge in getting a job. If anything, it was the contrary. Nobody was a scientist where I came from.

But in fact, I've managed to make a reasonable living from science. It hasn't made me rich, but I've done well enough to now have my own modest lab and to employ a couple of scientists and a couple of support staff, and to make sales all over the world. So I am well aware that science has commercial potential. I spend a fair bit of my time looking for it. I don't, however, attribute my success, such as it is, directly to my scientific knowledge, again such as it is.

It is much more to do with the frame of mind and the attitude that I have derived from it. The Universe is big and, compared to our size, abundant. Everything we could ever want is out there if we can work out the way to get it. Curiosity is the key to understanding, and understanding enables you to solve problems. People who get things done are the ones who ask questions and who think things through. Science is a great route to this mindset. But there are plenty of others. Music, history, literature and handicrafts all teach the same lessons in the end.

One thing I've learned is that beauty can be abstract, practical, or theoretical. A good tool is a thing of great beauty. The Bragg equation, the basis of crystallography which opened up the shape of molecules to chemists, is not only very useful, it is knicker-wettingly elegant.

So when I see the UK government cutting resources to arts education and transferring it to the STEM subjects, despite being as STEMy a person as you can imagine, I am filled with a white-hot fury. Science is a great thing, but it isn't great because you can make money out of it. It is great because it is one of the most sublime ways of satisfying our curiosity. I want to know what DNA looks like because it is DNA, not because of how useful that knowledge is. The usefulness is a bonus, not the objective.

The knuckleheads who come up with these kinds of ideas—and I use the word 'idea' there quite wrongly; it's more of a lack of ideas—simply don't grasp the way the world is.